Posted 2 months ago
You Say You Want a Devolution?
Kurt Anderson for Vanity Fair, on why culture, particularly the aesthetics, seem to keep looking backward rather than forward:
Why is this happening? In some large measure, I think, it’s an unconscious collective reaction to all the profound nonstop newness we’re experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts. People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we’re maxed out. So as the Web and artificially intelligent smartphones and the rise of China and 9/11 and the winners-take-all American economy and the Great Recession disrupt and transform our lives and hopes and dreams, we are clinging as never before to the familiar in matters of style and culture.
If this stylistic freeze is just a respite, a backward-looking counter-reaction to upheaval, then once we finally get accustomed to all the radical newness, things should return to normal—and what we’re wearing and driving and designing and producing right now will look totally démodécome 2032. Or not. Because rather than a temporary cultural glitch, these stagnant last couple of decades may be a secular rather than cyclical trend, the beginning of American civilization’s new chronic condition, a permanent loss of appetite for innovation and the shockingly new. After all, such a sensibility shift has happened again and again over the last several thousand years, that moment when all great cultures—Egyptian, Roman, Mayan, Islamic, French, Ottoman, British—slide irrevocably into an enervated late middle age.
His explanations as to why this is happening may or may not prove correct with time, but he nails the trend we’ve all subconsciously been participating in. I’ve had this phenomenon on the tip of my brain for quite a while now, ever since I put together that the Kennedy-era space race dying and fashionable young men choosing to dress like 1910 lumberjacks was not a coincidence.
I don’t think this trend is necessarily negative as an appreciation of the past is always wise, but there’s a definite “mirror looking into a mirror” thing going on right now in American culture as we let past eras define our present.
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